There are a number of prior art devices. They focus mainly on devices that can prepare a single food (for example, bread, ice cream, French fries, etc.) or provide automation for a fast food restaurant (a hamburger assembly robot).
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,363,746 describes an automated food making system for ice cream, custards, and similar foods.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,427,583 describes a system for automatically frying food.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,839,356, among others, describes automatically device for baking bread.
The limitation of the prior art devices is that they only handle a small portion of the tasks involved in preparing food. They require close supervision by a human operator. They also require the manual cleanup and are limited in the number of different dishes they can prepare.
What is needed is a device that can be used at home or in a restaurant, that operates almost completely autonomously, that can prepare a wide variety of dishes, and that can also clean itself. Such a machine could bring back home-cooked, made-from-scratch food to the modern table and allow people to experience a wider variety of different food on a daily basis. This would be much healthier food than the current mass-produced, industrial-prepared, pre-packaged food people so often consumed at present.
People spend a lot of time in the kitchen and a lot of money at restaurants. They also spend a great deal of money on prepared food such as frozen pizza, frozen dinners, etc. Much of this factory-made, fast food is not as nutritious or flavorful as homemade food or food prepared from scratch in a fine restaurant. The kitchen takes up a lot of space in a house and is expensive to build and equip. People who do cook at home spend a great deal of time going to the grocery store to replenish food supplies.
What is needed is an automated cooking device that can prepare almost any dish and replace most of the equipment in a modern kitchen, from the pantry to the stove, and handles the re-ordering and storing of ingredients.